The Sat Yoga Philosophy of Sex, Part Two:
Heterosexuality is the Real Perversion

Spirituality is the love of God. A spiritual life is a life dedicated to God and to the service of God. When someone who is self-identified as a heterosexual authentically enters a true spiritual path, they do so out of a desire to dedicate their love to the Supreme Being. Sexual desire is sublimated—not repressed—and it is this raising of the kundalini energy, the energy of desire, or libido, as Freud called it, that brings about the siddhis, the higher powers of a yogi, as well as the attainment of bliss. They come to realize that there is no innate sexual or gender identity or orientation. The Self is bodiless. The Self has no gender and no identifications. The Self is beyond desire and beyond fear.

But for most aspiring yogis, nuns or monks, the sublimation of sexual energy is not immediate or total. In the first phase of the transformation process, they enter into a state of ego-dystonic heterosexuality. This means they desire to be asexual, but the heterosexual drive is not yet extinguished. The heterosexual drive is no more natural than a homosexual or bisexual drive. Once one makes a commitment to sublimate all sexual energy, then the sexual drive is no longer ego-syntonic, but rather, it is felt as addictive, out of control. This causes many religious people to resort to unhealthy forms of self-castigation, including literal self-flagellation, in order to suppress the sex drive. That sort of violent suppression would not be encouraged or even considered by a Sat Yogi. But neither would acting-out of sexual urges. The solution is always a function of higher consciousness. One would remain in the witness state. One would meditate during such moments of the irruption of desire, one would prayerfully and humbly offer one's vital sexual energies to the Absolute, and would silence the mind in surrender to God.

Of course, the history of religion is littered with the stories of failed priests, nuns, sannyasis and monks, whose ego-dystonic heterosexuality got the best of them. One of the most famous modern cases is that of Thomas Merton. He had been a monk for many years, but had never overcome his perverse heterosexual urges. Merton's inspiring spiritual writings had made him famous, and perhaps paradoxically, there are few aphrodisiacs more powerful than such fame. A young female nurse who took care of him after a surgery, when he was in his fifties, and ripe for a midlife crisis, fell in love with him, and he could not summon up the will to ward off the temptation to break his vows.

The problem of heterosexual orientation is exacerbated in dualistic religious traditions such as Christianity, which too often make a fetish of both the ego and God. In the nondualist traditions, the ego is recognized as a delusion, and the ego itself becomes ego-dystonic. But not even that step is sufficient to overcome the sanskaras of sexual desire. God must be realized as the Self. This cannot be merely an intellectual belief. The realization must reach down into the depths of the unconscious mind, and upward to the highest reaches of the superconscious. Only then will the perversion of heterosexuality be overcome.

Heterosexuality, from the yogic perspective, is more of a perversion than homosexuality. It is morally perverse because it expresses the degraded state of the patriarchy that rules the collective consciousness today. The phallocentric values inherent to the straight culture are saturated with veiled oppression, affirmation of war and violence, greed, prestige-addiction, and nihilistic abuse of all the energies of desire. The LGBT community can be thought of on one level as offering a form of political resistance to the phallic norms of oppression. A Sat Yogi would always support gay rights as well as other forms of resistance, such as feminism and racial and ethnic liberation movements. And of course, many gay and lesbian individuals choose to become monks and yogis, and are wholeheartedly welcome in the spiritual family of Sat Yoga. In many other cultures, there is not the same obsessive heteronormativity as in the modern West. There are many possible sexualities. Sexuation is a cultural artifact, not an innate attribute. It varies in different cultures, and more importantly, at different assemblage points on the spectrum of consciousness. In some cultures, the shamans take up a new gender position that reflects an integration and transcendence of both male and female identifications. The transcendence of gender identity has always been essential to spiritual transformation. Christ taught that his disciples must become eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. This is a call to go beyond both gender and desire. The gay rights movements are important as forces that open up a larger paradigm of possibility in relation to human sexuality. But gay rights activists can be just as militant in their attachment to desire and ego identity as heterosexuals. They too can self-righteously oppress those who choose to transcend sexuality altogether in the quest for divinization and theosis. Yogis who transcend gender have in fact always been an oppressed minority. That is one reason they have often had to leave society and live in the desert, the jungle, or in mountain caves. Eventually, such transgendered yogis banded together to create monasteries and ashrams. The Essenes were one such group of yogis. Jesus was a member, and later the leader, of such a group. Their mission included political resistance, but went beyond, to battle against the cause of oppression that lies within the human soul.

In the same way, a Sat Yogi would not stop at the political level of resistance. In order to remove all traces of oppression from human nature, the dissolution of the ego itself is necessary. The ego, and particularly the censor that lies beneath the threshold of ordinary waking consciousness, is the real inner oppressor. The censor is responsible for humans being clueless about the true nature of sexuality, as well as about the structure of the ego itself. The ego is split so that its conscious persona remains in plausible deniability of its true intentions. The censor keeps its real agendas unconscious, so that it can rule over consciousness. Not only is unconscious desire repressed, but the soul is both oppressed and repressed by the ego; love is oppressed; the pure Spirit is even more profoundly, primordially, repressed. And the inner oppression of love is projected upon the world, where it multiplies ad infinitum and ad nauseam. So the greatest pneumatic political act of liberation is to sacrifice the ego to the Supreme Self. This is the aim of Sat Yoga. And that is why among Sat Yogis, there is no one either straight or gay. All Sat Yogis are transsexuals. In fact, successful Sat Yogis become transhuman. The transcendence of the human level of consciousness will in time create an evolutionary effect in our physical bodies as well. The mutations that are occurring will result in a new kind of sexuality in the future. Reproduction in the next yuga will be asexual, through a kind of divine parthenogenesis, as prefigured in the myths of immaculate conception that are embedded in many religious traditions. But that will be the subject  of a future essay.

In the meantime, may all beings overcome the trauma of sexuality through attaining the bisexual integration of yin and yang, the purity of transsexual union with Emptiness, and the joyous, love-filled realization of Supreme Liberation.

Namaste,

Shunyamurti